The four companies in the inner circle— Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft— have a combined market capitalization of

Within books-obsessed Amazon, though, Scott didn’t distinguish herself as a books enthusiast, as a fiction writer, or as much more than the boss’s pleasant wife who handled numbers.

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Around 1998, Stephen Verigin, a Sacramento-based engineer at the California Department of Water Resources got a note from headquarters. “There was a request from a novelist regarding an engineer,” the note read. When Verigin met Scott — who didn’t mention her Amazon connection — in person, she told him she was writing a book about a dam engineer. He found her impressively detail oriented, digging into engineering technicalities and geothermal specifics. “I’m a typical engineer, pretty introverted, and she was someone that I was immediately comfortable talking to,” he says. Over the next several months, he answered her questions. She didn’t talk about her personal life, other than mentioning she was from Seattle and originally from Marin.

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The early work environment celebrated literature and wonkiness. Most of the first crop of Amazon employees were “book nerds,” says Erica Jorgensen, who joined in 1997 as a copy editor. Employees had to provide SAT scores before getting hired, and once they were on staff, competed to throw around big words. They got excited to feature authors like Penelope Fitzgerald and Arundhati Roy on the site, or meet Michael Chabon when he dropped by the office.

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The first time I spoke with Jennings Anderson, I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. I mean that genuinely — I did not believe him. He was a little incredulous about it himself. I felt like he was sharing an important secret with me that the world didn’t yet know.

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For her new husband, books were an opportunity. “I picked books as the first, best product to sell online after making a list of, like, 20 different products,” he told an interviewer in 1997. “There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far,” he said, so an online bookstore was “a business plan that made sense in the context of that internet growth.”

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Amid all the talk of books, few co-workers knew of Scott’s literary pedigree and ambitions. In those years, Scott was quietly taking a night course at the University of Washington on fiction writing, then a writing workshop, working on a draft of what would become her first novel, according to her writing teacher at the time, Carole Glickfeld. Within books-obsessed Amazon, though, Scott didn’t distinguish herself as a books enthusiast, as a fiction writer, or as much more than the boss’s pleasant wife who handled numbers. She mostly stayed at her desk, which a 1997 office map shows was in a shared office off an interior corridor, just on the other side of the copier room. Years later, Jorgensen was reading Publishers Weekly and was surprised to see a review of a novel by Scott. “I don’t think it occurred to me for a long time that she herself was a writer,” Jorgensen says.

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In 2005, Scott published the book, The Testing of Luther Albright, about an emotionally distant engineer who recounts his work life and complex relationships with his wife and son. She landed the same high-powered literary agent as Toni Morrison, and an imprint of HarperCollins, a renowned publishing house, published the book. The novel garnered mediocre reviews, with the New York Times criticizing Scott’s “heavy-handed symbolism” but calling the novel “quietly absorbing.” The book sold tepidly, at fewer than 2,000 copies, according to NPD BookScan.

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Meanwhile, Bezos was working to expand Amazon beyond its bookish roots. It had an IPO in 1997; after that, employees watched the stock price on their computer terminals and “some people wrote little tools to monitor how much they were worth by the minute,” Kochmer says. The site expanded to music, then became a marketplace by allowing third-party vendors. At the end of 1999, Bezos was named Time’s Person of the Year, the “king of cybercommerce.” Amazon employees began to change, too. Very quickly, says Kochmer, the company was filled with “a bunch of people that had gotten their MBAs.”

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Bezos and Scott launched the business in their garage, eventually moving to a rundown office in an industrial section of Seattle. Scott worked as the company’s bookkeeper and administrator: Employees went to her to fix paycheck problems or get help booking travel. “She seemed perfectly content with what she was doing: I never got a sense of, this is beneath me or I wish I was somewhere else,” Jonathan Kochmer, who joined the company in 1996, tells Marker.

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Although Bezos had chosen a subject that was his wife’s passion, his interest was clearly around growing the company. “I don’t remember him getting excited about authors coming: He was just focused on the business — he was more into the numbers of how many visitors the website had,” remembers Jorgensen. Kochmer agrees: “Jeff was very much, get big fast, make history.”

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The open secret Jennings filled me in on is that OpenStreetMap (OSM) is now at the center of an unholy alliance of the world’s largest and wealthiest technology companies. The most valuable companies in the world are treating OSM as critical infrastructure for some of the most-used software ever written.

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When Scott gave a reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Bezos attended and bought a book, recalls Rick Simonson, senior buyer at the store. By then, Amazon’s intentions of edging out traditional bookstores like Elliott Bay was glaring, and “it was a little odd to have him in there,” Simonson says. If anything, Scott seemed eager to distance herself from Amazon. “She seemed pretty modest about it, like she was happy to have her book treated seriously,” Simonson tells Marker. She embarked on a traditional book tour at independent bookstores.

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d that it wasn’t the iOS-penetrated, English-speaking U.S. market that would form the critical mass of WhatsApp users. Free international messaging primarily appeals to people who have friends and partners abroad — which isn’t America’s strong suit. Americans travel and study abroad less, compared to Europeans and Asians.,

At the time, Amazon was one of several competitors trying to figure out online bookselling, and it was unclear who would win, if any: Barnes